After months of posting about Pandora getting ready to cross to the Med, breaking stuff in the Med, waiting for new stuff to be delivered in the Med, trying to understand the weather in the Med, coming home to CT from the Med, thinking about getting back to the Med… Well, you get the drift. Med, Med, Med. Blah, blah, blah…the Med.
How about Maine?
A few days ago I drove to Portland to meet up with my friend George, who has helped move Pandora many places over the years, to help him move his trawler back to Essex. To be aboard his boat “Knot Workin” (he’s retired…Get it?)
Anyway, after motoring everywhere in the Med, being on a boat that has to motor because it is, well, a motorboat, is actually refreshing. When it’s time to go, we dropped the mooring, turned on the engine and a few hours later we picked up another mooring. Not a lot of drama, just motoring. And, call me crazy, but I do enjoy sitting in a lawn chair on the back deck as we motor along.
Here’s my home for the next few days. Not workin at all, just point and go, lawn chairs and all.
When I arrived it was raining cats and dogs and the wind was really blowing but by the next morning it had cleared out, but not before putting on a lovely show of rainbow jelly fish at dusk, no doubt, escorting the rain on their westward journey.
This is, I believe, my 14th trip to Maine and we are going to places that I have never been, as we work our way south from Portland to the Cape Cod Canal. The scenery is lovely and very different than anything I have seen on our years cruising, “Down East”. And certainly a lot different from our time down south and now in the Med.
I am seeing lighthouses. Lots of lighthouses. Portland light, the oldest lighthouse in Maine, built in 1791 by orders of George Washington. And speaking of Washington, it is widely believed that his decision not to run for office again was his greatest achievement.
One of the best-known observations about this decision came not from Washington but from King George III. When told Washington intended to resign his commission after the Revolutionary War and later retire after serving as president, the king reportedly said:
“If he does that, he will be the greatest man in the world.”
Perhaps, if he lived during a different time, and now it is surely a “different” time, he might have won the Nobel Prize. Hmm…
His legacy, and Portland light, endure.
And speaking of government, we visited Kittery, on the border of New Hampshire and Maine, home of the Portsmouth Navy Yard, the largest employer in Maine and home to thousands of workers that head over the bridge to the shipyard every day to work on refitting nuclear Subs.
The skyline is dominated by huge cranes.
This seagull seemed to be plenty used to all the commotion. A spy? He did seem pretty intent on somthing and was careful to ignore my presence.
It was a sort of “homecoming” for me, being in Maine again, we encountered a number of boats that brought back memories.
This Cornish Crabber, was a model that we almost bought way back as we were considering what small cruising boat to buy as our first “big” boat. We saw one at a boat show in Nova Scotia where we were on our very first vacation as a married couple in 1977.
Considering where Pandora is now, the Med, and the boat herself, at 47′, life is very different.
I was taken by seeing this Tartan 37, our third cruising boat and the first to take us to Maine. I was aboard “Electra” that I did my first overnight passage from the Cape Cod Canal to Camden. As I left the canal on that evening, heading out into the twilight that I thought to myself, “I have no right to be doing this.” But we arrived safely.
I was taken by ths lovely wood double ender. Over the years I flirted with buying a wooden boat and always backed off, once even after putting a deposit on an old Crosby Cape Cod Catboat. Backing out was probably the only time I actually made a good financial decision on a boat.
I still love “looking at but not buying” wooden boats.
And, speaking of close calls and bad decisions, I expect that there were many that headed down the wrong path that spent time in the Portsmouth Navy Prison.
The Portsmouth Naval Prison housed more than 86,000 Navy and Marine Corps prisoners between 1908 and 1974. Over the years, a number of famous names became associated with it including many captured U-boat captains and crew.
But perhaps the most famous connection was Humphrey Bogart who, while serving in the US Navy during WWI escorted prisoners to Portsmouth. The persistent story that he was an inmate himself is almost certainly false. Some accounts also claim he received the facial scar seen in later life during a prisoner escort, but historians disagree on that as well.
Sadly, the prison now remains vacant although it seems to be in pretty good shape but is off limits to the public given the highly secret work being done on the island.
Back to the “nostalgia” series of older boats that I saw, this boat, a Bayfield 40 Persistence is the same model as one that my father-in-law owned many years ago. The fact that his boat was named Constance makes me wonder if it is the same boat as Persistence seems so similar and the name is in exactly the same place. They only built this model from 1982 to 1988 and closed after a fire destroyed the facility. I took a photo of the hull identification number and as the boat is documented, perhaps I might be able to track her down and see if the boat is the same one. With her clipper bow, turned wooden posts (covered with canvas in this photo) and “shippy” look, she was fairly typical of the time. While she looks to be about perfect and clearly recently painted and restored, her underbody was quite foul so I expect that she isn’t getting much use.
It was good to see a lobsterman plying his craft, one of many plying the waters of Maine.
And, of course a commercial dragger, something that I associate with our many years cruising Block Island Sound. I wonder where he was heading. With the high price of diesel these days, I hope he has a good catch.
Last night we took a mooring in Situate Harbor and today we head the last leg, about 50 miles to the Cape Cod Canal. After that, Newport and home to Essex.
This run as certainly been different than anything that I’ve done aboard Pandora since 2012 when we first headed south.
Yes, different, and in a good way. I have missed Maine.